New Roman Numerals

For centuries, we have used the Roman Numerals on clocks, notes, and countless other things.

But the question is, should we be using this old method?

Shouldn't we make a more modern and updated version of the Numerals?

I say YES!

Instead of this:

I=1

II=2

III=3

IV=4

V=5

VI=6

We should use this:

I=i
II=-1
III=-i
IV=Individual Values
V=Victory

VI=Vehicular Intelligence: Elon Musk

Check my list of references after the break.

Perfect

I want to drive to this video's creator's house and personally hand them $47,000.00.

Captain Kirk watches Miley Cyrus performance

What Does It Mean?

Every once in a while my son Ben will ask me what some song or other is about. Inevitably it is some song I've liked and listened to for the last thirty years, so the most common answer I give him is..."Uh...I'm not really sure." I think this is very common. You get caught up in the catchy tune, and you can sing the chorus, because hey, they sing that part more than once! But it's usually too much work to try to decipher the lyrics and then try to figure out what they meant with the poetic language, dense symbolism, and obscure references.

Just off the top of my head here are a few songs that are commonly misunderstood.

As Much as You Know

Here's a simple wisdom that I think you should keep in mind.

Let's begin: From a start, a person only knows as much as their surroundings.

Say you were born in a cave, and you grew up hunting rabbits and picking fruits and berries. That's what you would know from your surroundings.

Now, say you were born in a big hospital, you were raised in a New York City penthouse, with servants and fancy meals handed to you on a silver platter, (literally) and your parents were rich oil baron billionaires who made absolutely sure that their little popkin had no idea what a financial problem was.

Sleep Away

Do you ever find that when you are falling asleep, you suddenly get this great idea that you really just must get up and write down, because it's the cleverest/most original/funniest idea ever? And then you don't get up and write it down, because, one, you're just too comfy, and two, the idea is so incredible that you have no doubt that you will remember it first thing in the morning, at which point, you imagine, you will either write it down, or tell someone, and it will be awesome, and you get points.

 But what inevitably happens is that along about lunch time you vaguely remember you were thinking something last night, and it seemed terribly clever/important/hilarious at the time, and it had something to do with cats, or bananas, or squeezing a rubber owl in a vise, and what you can remember of it now seems weird and pointless. 

 

Well folks, this is one of those times, but this time, around about lunch time, I remembered exactly what I was thinking but didn't write down. And it goes like this:

There are some people who, although they may love travel, hate staying in hotels or motels. There can be many reasons for this, but for me, I just can't sleep in a strange place. I wake up every few minutes and by morning, I'm loopy from not sleeping at all and get up and pee in the closet. I think if the place had a more homey feel, I could get past this. But what could the establishment do to help this along? They're not going to duplicate the experience of grandma's afghan or that just right recliner you bought at a yard sale, or that mucus-colored wallpaper that you hate but somehow find comforting. But there's one thing I think they could do that would be both feasible and effective. 

 

Smell.

Smell is the most powerful sense for evoking a sense of place and stimulating emotion. And just as you can buy "new car scent" in a can, it shouldn't be hard to generate lots of "homey" scents that can be sprayed into a room before you check in. When you make your reservation, you pick from a list of scents that the hotel provides. For the most part, these would not be flowery, air-freshener scents. Remember, we're trying to make you feel at home. These would be every day scents of a busy and occupied household. Here's some possible scents you could choose from:

Someone cooked bacon about an hour ago.

Mom's dyeing her hair again!
Dad's off the wagon.

Dampness.

Joe Bob played football again last night.
Beer, cigarettes, and forty-year-old carpet.
The ice chest from that fishing trip, which will never be the same.
I have thirteen dogs.

Babies!

That party from last weekend that you still haven't finished cleaning up after.

Oh my God, what did the dog do?

Grandma, your pilot light is out.

Old newspapers and pet urine. Smells like home!

You get the idea. If I walked into a hotel room and instead of smelling that distinctive "sanitized hotel room" scent, I got a whiff of Joe Bob's pile of jockey shorts or the ubiquitous hidden cat barf, I'd immediately feel more comfortable. 

 

Any suggestions? What would make you feel at home away from home?

Cats know squat

WARNING: This post is about people and animals urinating. I'm sure you need no more enticement to keep reading, so here it is:

THINGS MY CAT DOES NOT UNDERSTAND #1: Urinating

I don’t think cats understand urinating. At least not the way dogs do. Or I should say, male dogs. When a dog lifts his leg, he’s not just urinating, he’s aiming at something. He’s got an innate sense of fluid dynamics – pressure, volume, trajectory – that your average cat just doesn’t have. What happens for a cat is, he’s walking along and suddenly, “Hey, I feel like I have to squat!” He feels something happening, so when he’s done he turns around to look. He finds a smelly wet patch and thinks, “Whoa! I almost sat in that! I better cover it up before someone else steps in it.”

Now, it has often been observed that cats don’t see humans as companions so much as food processors and scratching machines. I believe this based on the fact that a cat will come up to you and start sharpening his claws on your leg, as if you were no more than a mobile tree. I think it’s the challenge that excites them. But you would never see a cat do that to another cat. So we have a preexisting bias of unbalanced respect in the first place, which leads to the assumption that whatever the human is doing that doesn’t directly affect the cat is beneath notice.

I live in the woods. When I’m way out in the backyard, which is just another part of the forest, I’ve often found it more convenient to just pee behind a tree than to walk all the way back to the house. When my dog sees this, I can tell he understands. I know he’s thinking, “Yep. Good job. Nice arc. That’s now your tree.” And then he goes on to mark out his own territory: “This here’s my tree. And that’s my bucket. This corner of the house…Hey, neighbor kid! My kid now.” And so on.

Now when my cat sees me peeing behind a tree, he’s thinking, “Food processor! Scratching machine!” and walks right up. He’s got no idea about fluid dynamics. In particular the relationship of pressure to trajectory as it relates to distance. So he comes right up to stand at my feet and says, ‘Hey, food processor! How about some scrPTHPTHPTHPTHPHTPH!!”

George Takei's Last Name

Proper pronunciation is important, especially if you are pronouncing someone's name.

If you pronounce someone's name improperly, it can be very offensive.

George Takei, say it out loud. I bet you mispronounced it.

Takei: Teh•kay

Teh•kay, not kai, kay.

GET IT? No? Then maybe you need a visual representation:

Pronunciation: Pro•NUN•see•a•shun

Where Did Teddy Bears Come From?

It is a common misconception that the "Teddy Bear" was named after Theodore Roosevelt, but was actually named after Sir Lawrence Theodore "Teddy" Bayer of mid seventeenth century Spain. During his early childhood, his entire family was mauled by a pack of, now extinct, Spanish Bears who hunted in packs, similar in fashion to wolves. 

(Spanish Bear)

The reason for their extinction was that Sir Lawrence had started a personal vendetta against the Spanish Bear species, eventually hunting them and having them all stuffed. After Sir Lawrence died, his descendants looted his home (for he had not written a Will, and they did not like him anyway) and found the thousands of stuffed Spanish Bears. They easily mistook them as children's toys, and since their surname was "Bayer," they named it for themselves. So there you have it! The true birth of the Teddy Bayer!

A Nice Pet

You know, if I had a pet Manatee, I would probably name him "Hugh."

Then, I could invite people to my house to witness all of Hugh Manatee.

Never Enough Notepad

Yay for a hundred Notepads!

Ham and Cheesy

Here's something I did recently. For a snack, I took a piece of ham, and sprinkled some shredded cheese on it. Not just a little cheese, I really put a wad on there. And then rolled it up. I lifted it to my mouth and just as I was taking a bite of it, I somehow managed to breathe in. This turned the rolled up ham into a miniature cheese cannon which launched a spray of finely shredded cheese particles toward the back of my throat. Not content to stop there, many of the particles, noticing that the path continued in the down direction, proceeded to explore this new avenue at high speed. After mere micro-seconds, they got bored with this new direction..

“Oh, look,” said one cheese particle to another. “Where do you suppose that opening leads to?”

Yes, I know that's a pretty long sentence to speak in mere micro-seconds, but cheese talks really fast.

“I think it's the lungs,” said the second cheese particle. “Let's go in there! I hear it's da bomb!”

Cheese isn't really good at staying current and frequently uses out-dated expressions in an effort to appear hip, but it really just comes across as....well, you know. But we know what it meant.

So anyway, they decided to go into the lungs, which I can only assume made the cheese particles happy, but what it did for me was cause me to cough and hack and gasp for breath for almost ten minutes. On thinking about how I did this to myself, I decided that it had been a pretty stupid thing to do. But it gave me an idea for a new thing you can do when someone you know does something as equally stupid as sucking cheese through a ham tube.

Like maybe he put his MP3 player in his shirt pocket when he went to the restroom. And maybe, after using the restroom, accidentally knocked his headphones off. No, no, they did not fall into the toilet. They were too cheap for that. But when your friend leaned over to pick them up, the MP3 player slid out of his pocket. Toilets are not fussy, yet while they are perfectly content to do their job without comment, they understandably yearn for finer things. Like MP3 players. So the toilet sucks in the hapless player, like cheese from a ham tube. Now we will not speculate on whether or not your friend reaches into the toilet to retrieve the player, nor will we consider whether it could survive such treatment; we will content ourselves to assume that the MP3 player was no longer a part of your friend's life after it hit bottom. Now, this is not to suggest that this actually happened to me, or that I would reach in after the player, and take it apart and try to dry it out, to no avail. I didn't suggest that at all. This is all theoretical, of course. Yes, yes, you understand.

So your friend tells you about this and at first you laugh. But then you stop, and, savoring the moment, you say to him, your voice dripping with mock disdain, “You cheese breather!”

Math?

(DON'T NEED/TAKE)*(MONEY+FAME+CREDIT CARD TO RIDE THIS TRAIN) = (THAT'S)^LOVE

Think about this, friends.

Now, I am going to throw this idea out to you, to maybe see things a little differently. I dunno if it'll work, but it doesn't hurt to try.

So, have you ever been talking to someone, or watching TV, or hunting an octopus, or something when suddenly a memory pops into your head?

Not a good memory, a bad one, a really bad one. Y'know, the one where you said that ridiculously stupid thing to your friend or snapped at the lady talking through the speaker at the drive through and made her cry because you didn't know that her father died yesterday. Yeah, those kind of memories.

We all have them. They suck. They make us feel horrible on the inside. They make you think: "Oh my God, why did I do that?"

Well, I have theorized a possible reason for these sudden vivid remembrances.

I believe that this habit of remembering bad things is an instinctive trait, something ingrained deep into our subconscious minds.

This instinct, in my opinion, is a good thing. First, let's explore why I say that.

Back in our cave-dwelling past, bad and probably deadly experiences were probably more common then. So, if a caveman made a really bad life-threatening mistake, it would stick in his mind for the rest of his life. Just like our less-deadly mistakes. The caveman would be occasionally reminded of this event when when it pops into his mind spontaneously. Over and over again.

So, why do we have these memories? We have them to constantly remind us to never do that stupid thing again. That is what the memories are for.

And to me, that sounds like a good thing.